Like former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and current Mayor Bill de Blasio, Republican candidate for mayor Paul Massey originally hails from Boston and came to the City to stake his claim in life in 1983.
After first working as a bartender on the Upper East Side. Massey got into real estate as a broker, which led him into launching Massey Knakel Realty services in 1988, which he built into the nation’s largest privately owned commercial property firms with operations in every neighborhood of all the boroughs. Massey Knakal was ranked New York’s #1 investment sales firm in volume for 14 consecutive years and was sold to Cushman & Wakefield in 2014.
Massey received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Colgate University in 1982. He has been married to his wife Gretchen for 28 years. They have three grown children, PJ, Sarah, and Greta.
Massey decided he was going to run for mayor last summer — styling himself in the mold of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as a wealthy businessman and an outsider to politics with the management chops needed to run the nation’s biggest city. His desire has also been fueled with feelings that Mayor Bill de Blasio is both unethical and a poor manager of the city.
The following KCP interview took place over lunch at The Farm on Adderley restaurant on Cortelyou Road in Ditmas Park as part of Massey’s five-borough tour last week.
KCP: Like former Mayor Bloomberg, you’re running in part because as a wealthy man you won’t be beholden to special interests. Do you think you need a lot of money to be a fair politician in New York City?
Paul Massey: I love that I’ve taken no PAC money, no special interest money, no animal rights money. I’m not going to be chasing horse and buggies around Central Park trying to get rid of them. I’m living to the strict letter of the election law limits. I’m also on record as saying when I’m mayor of New York City, if anyones doing business with the city, I’ll take no money from them. De Blasio had that opportunity but he allowed himself to use these PACs, which I think was specifically about avoiding campaign giving limits, and then your judgement is clouded by UFT [United Federation of Teachers] money so you don’t even look at good things about like what’s going on with charter schools. Maybe you should support religious education in some ways that helps them because if you threw the religious parochial schools back in the system, the public schools would collapse worse than it is now. So you don’t have to do it the old fashion way. I would self-fund this election if I could and I’m putting a bunch of my own dough in, but that’s not going to influence the outcome of this election. What’s going to influence the outcome is a groundswell, and I’m the best alternative choice so you don’t have to do it the old way.
When I’m mayor you ‘re going to love the transparency, the objective good decisions, and we’ll get the lobbyists out of City Hall.
While these are lofty points and goals, the electorate demographics in the City are a majority black and Latino, who tend to be diehard Democrats. How do you plan to win them over?
I think those demographics are going to vote for me because when you and others really dissect my history as a business person, and go interview my employees, and go interview my clients, and go interview the people who know me, who watched me for 30 years, and you’re going to see the tiger doesn’t really change its stripes. You’re going to see discipline, a well-run business, lofty goals and that the all-the-time execution is strong. So if I go out and say I’m going to give you school choice, there are people who know me will tell you if I promise you something, it’s going to happen. Jobs. I’ve created thousands of jobs. I can do that with my hands tied behind my back and people want jobs. They want technical training, vocational training, college prep programs. I’m going to put those in place.and that’s something not just blacks and Hispanics want but something everybody wants. So pick the guy that’s going to deliver.
The mayor has been having trouble with Gov. Cuomo in regards to personality clashes. Do you see yourself working well with the governor and being able to cross party lines?
I don’t even think politically. I know I’m going to get along really well with him. He’s well intended about New York – both with the city and state. I’m going to work with him really well, and by the way, the federal government as well because our immigration policy is undefined and I want a chunk of that trillion dollar in infrastructure money that’s being thrown around. The president hates the mayor. That’s not going to happen on my watch. Everyone wants a grown up in the room. Not somebody that’s throwing Molotov cocktails at the governor and the president.
As a candidate you will likely come under fire as being called a Trump Republican. Where are you on national healthcare for example?
Here’s the deal with me. It’s not a political job to me. It’s a managerial CEO job and I’ve got the Independence Party endorsement, and I’ll be on other ballot lines so I’ll be attracting independents, Democrats, Republicans, and everyone in between. On the healthcare thing it’s unresolved, but at my core anyone who has insurance now – and there’s a half a million people in Brooklyn who are at risk right now – everyone who has healthcare will be able to keep health care if I have anything to say about it. And also we need care for everybody. Everyone who walks into a hospital is going to get care. We’ll make that work. Those two things are who I am at the core and I’ll fight for that.
And where do you stand with New York being a ‘Sanctuary City'”?
The issue with being a Sanctuary City is again our national policy is undefined, and because I’ll be the grown up in the room not throwing insults, I’ll work with the Senate and the Congress with something we’re all aligned with, but right now regarding the big hot button, which is deportation, [NYPD] Commissioner O’Neil is pursuing felons. If you’re a felon, he’s going to hand you over to immigration. He favors handing over people on Rikers that are felons too. I also support a third thing about him that he’s not going to use police resources in chasing people who didn’t commit crimes. That where I think we’re best to be right now.
I’ve been on different sides of this. It’s a very emotional thing. I get the emotion about worrying about being deported if you’re not a criminal. I understand the people who are concerned about the perception the mayor will let violent felons walk. So you can see the extremes that these kinds of emotions would bring. I’m just going to work with everybody to come up with an immigration policy we’re all proud of. We’re the city of immigrants. A lot of these people are good hard-working people and you have to respect that, and create a real path to citizenship that’s real and achievable, and you can see it and it’s concrete and it’s not BS. So we’ll figure it out.
What do you think of the mayor’s often stated ‘tale of two cities’ and identity politics as a whole?
He [de Blasio] is divisive. The tale of two cities still permeates everything about him. It’s black versus white, rich against poor. I think its dangerous and everyone lives in New York because they embrace diversity. Everybody here believes we’re one city and he’s totally out of touch about that. I also think he’s incompetent. I get to work at 6:45 a.m. for 30 years. He’s strolling into the office at noon three days a week, and two days a week he’s working out of a bar campaigning. Everything that’s going on in New York is because no one’s in charge. I’m not blaming anyone else but him. He acts like he doesn’t want the job. He acts like he would rather be the president of the United States or the head of the progressive movement for the U.S. He’s been out of the City 140 days or more in three years on business that has nothing to do with the City and I think the guy’s miserable…
You come from the for-profit private sector, and much government is more driven by providing services rather than profit. Plus you come from the real estate sector which is extremely market driven, which has also added to gentrification in the city which has driven many longtime residents out of their neighborhood and sometimes even out of the city. How do you plan on keeping the city livable for the working class?
I don’t want people pushed out of their neighborhoods. A great way to keep people in their neighborhoods and not get pushed out is housing. The mayor’s crowing about 6,000 units of housing being created this year. All of those units were created under Bloomberg and because he hates the governor and the governor hates him things aren’t getting done. The big leverage in housing is federal and state funding. The governor has to create tax abatement programs that make it cheap enough for developers to develop affordable housing. I’ll work with the governor to make affordable housing work. There’s 3.4 million units of housing in the city where the average age is 80 years old so the average lifespan of housing stock is running out, and we’re having population increases. You want people to stay in the neighborhood. We need to build housing on a scale that’s not being discussed now. I can do that. I’ll get that done. But I’ll include people from the neighborhoods in the conversation.
Finally, I’ll play devil’s advocate here. The big rap against you is you lived in Westchester and raised your kids there, and that you just moved back to run for mayor. Any comments on that?
I’ve lived in New York City and built a business in 53 neighborhoods. I know the community leaders in every neighborhood . My kids live in Manhattan, and my wife and I live in Manhattan. I love so much of this city, but for 30 years for six to seven days a week, I’ve been in every neighborhood of New York talking to people. You can’t come up with a more New York candidate than me.
